Tag: productivity

Not a hugely productive day today, unfortunately. Although since I have been monitoring my productivity hourly, I have been way more productive than normal, which is interesting.

This morning I was planning to write a cron job to save my daily productivity totals to a database, but I realised that I actually have all the information in my Mac OS/X calendar anyway, and can just retrieve the data there.

I coded up a script to output a chart of what my productivity looks like for the day. It is based on my Pomodoro software that logs all the time-boxes to my calendar on Mac OS/X. My program extracts all the information and constructs a nice looking chart. The idea is that I track what things are making me more productive.

I’ve been using time-boxing for quite a while, off and on. I have a task list every day and start timing chunks of time in which to work on the tasks. I’m not like Helen, who finds it easy to work at home. I find it far easier to work at a client’s office. This has changed recently though, thanks to my new work-flow.

I’ve just had a frustrating 15 minutes trying to get a custom “Info” directory working with Emacs on my Mac. I like to have my own texinfo files in a ~/my/doc/info directory. Unfortunately, I was having a hard job getting Emacs to incorporate the directory whenever I hit Ctl-h i.

OK, here is an idea I had this morning: It’s called “Mnemonic Tagging”. The idea is that you create a list of keywords (or tags) that you use to mentally file mnemonic visualizations. For each of these tags you imagine something that represents the tag, followed by a chain of mnemonics that relate to that tag.

I have been studying maths for quite a few years now, but I still find it a struggle to remember various formulas/equations, especially when starting a new topic. I’ve been thinking about developing my own mnemonic system for math symbols to help me memorize equations easily.

I would need to relate various mathematical operators to something else that is easy to visualize. The bracketing of expressions is problematic, you would need to have a way of visualizing a collection of things that the operator acts on.

I think that having a mnemonic system for maths would help internalize the ideas and models within a domain. It’s obviously still a work in progress!

I’ve just been reading this Forbes article called “The Rise of Developeronomics”. The author argues that because increasingly software is the core value proposition that differentiates companies from each other, that software developers are more and more becoming the wealth creators in society. The author recommends investing in software developers as a way of leveraging your own capital. This article builds on an earlier article by David Kirpatick called “Now Every Company is a Software Company”.

Bryan Morris has a post about how he has set up Emacs using org-mode to implement a Kanban board. He uses table mode within org-mode, and hyper-linking to link items within the table, to actual org-mode tasks. To me, this setup seems a little clunky, so I thought I’d describe my current system.